She raised her head and looked into my eyes. The smile on my face froze. A chill went through me and I stood motionless. The eyes in that sweet, little-girl face were strangely empty—as if the owner of a house had drawn the blinds and gone away. Once before I had seen such eyes: They had belonged to an inmate of a mental institution, one I'd visited as a college student. "She's found life unendurable," the resident psychiatrist had explained, "so she's retreated from the world." She had, he went on, killed her husband in a fit of insane jealousy. But this child—she could have been my own small, lovable niece except for those blank, desolate eyes. Dear God, I thought, what horror has entered the life of this innocent little girl?